Weathering The Storm
by Aeidhryn
Summary: How did they make it from the funeral to the office to her house? She doesn't know...she'll make a little small talk, and get him out. Today she just needs to weather the storm alone. For some reason, though, he refuses to leave... Oneshot. Unbeta'd.


Disclaimer: All hail Bruno Heller. This is bad angst and he'd be ashamed of it, but (ye gods!) I have no beta, and the only way to get better is to get constructive criticism, and lots of it. Feel free to go vicious on this one—it needs help, and badly.

"Hey," he says. What possessed her to bring him here? How did they make it from the funeral to the office to her house? She doesn't know. All she knows is that she'll make a little small talk, and get him out. Sometimes he's helpful, but today she just needs to weather the storm alone.

"I can't believe I missed the gun running connection. I _worked _the MacGregor case five years ago—I should've spotted it from the start," she grumbles, making a supreme effort to keep her voice low and irritated. It doesn't fool him.

"It's only natural that your first reaction is to break down a little. It's okay if you sit this one out, really it is— Lisbon, you're not thinking straight. You have to stop pretending. You have to let it out." _She's _not thinking straight. Ha.

He sighs her name. "Lisbon. Listen to me." His hand is warm on her shoulder, and then in a moment of terrifying clarity she knows what's going to happen next: he's going to monologue in that liquid-honey, case-cracking voice of his, and then he's going to hold her, and she's going to let him. _No._

Suddenly she spins around and has her Glock just above his nose. There's a faint echo of a thought in the back of her head: _The safety's in the trigger. How dumb is that?_

"That's not my first reaction—_this _is." Her hand doesn't waver. "This is all I am, and this is all I have, and please God it won't be taken away from me, least of all by you." She doesn't mean the gun, exactly. She means the mask, the work, the distractions and everything that's ever defended her from breaking down on someone else's shoulder—and _damn_ him for surmounting them so _easily_.

Then she's repulsed by the stark fear in his eyes. She drops the gun on the floor. How dumb of her, to do that. A real gun, loaded, shoved into his forehead. Isn't that what her nightmares are made of? There's genuine fear there, yes, but all she wanted, all she wanted was to explain. To explain and for him to understand, just once, what she's afraid of, what her problem is, what's going on. Who she is and why she can't and why she does. (She doesn't know why it is she did what she just did, but—)

Judging by his reaction, it's nothing good.

"Just go away," she says, face in the shadows now, sniffles and catches leaking out at the edges of her words, ugly and childish and irrepressible. There was a reason she's never done this before. A million reasons, and now that's she's failed just once to restrain herself, it's all over. It's all over, and it's not coming back again. Maybe when she wakes up in the morning, this will never have happened. Maybe tomorrow, this will never have been. She abandons that thought a half-second later. It's as useless as a blank cartridge. (Well, delusion's never been one of her strong points.)

He waits for a long time, so long, and she's so sorry. So sorry, but she has to stop now; she's gone too far and another word will only take her farther, dammit. Slowly, the air cools, and she finds another ounce of strength in silence.

"It's all right, you can go," she repeats weakly. She sits down. So does he. Why won't he just give up already and stop watching her?

The silence sits and ferments and curdles in years, centuries of time. There are no tears. If he's not going to show any pain at this, neither is she. She pretends this is some kind of test, while her muscles strain to keep her upright in the same stiff position for hours.

She must have fallen asleep somewhere along the line, because the living room clock says it's six-thirty in the morning, and sure enough, there's pale light coming in through the windows. She smells tea. _Oh no…_She gets up, ignores her screaming muscles and goes to the kitchen. Yes, he's still there. (Dammit).

Her double failure stings, just enough for her to look him in the eye—after all this, he's still nothing but worried for her (for, not about)—and says: "I told you to go."

His waiting ploy has lost. For a long moment, he lowers the tea to the coffee table and stares in disbelief, blinks once. Then—

"I'm going," he says.

Finally, there's the slight scrape of wood on wood, her front door being shut delicately. She makes it halfway through the tea before she has to go get a Kleenex. Then she gives up on the Kleenex entirely, puts her head on her arms, and sobs. She cries because she won, she cries because she lost, she cries because she never knew she had it in her, she cries because she always did. She cries because he was so gentle, and cries because he shouldn't be, it's going to come back to hurt him. She cries because she did the right thing, and it's so wrong. She cries and cries and cries until she can't possibly be more of a mess, and then she gets up to clean her face off and spill the tea all over her feet. The cup shatters. It's the final trigger, and pain shifts to irritation and disgust.

Dammit, she's not going to start bawling all over again in a puddle of _tea._ It's bad enough that she cried. But once the damn stuff builds up, it has to get out sometime, somehow, some way. Autopilot takes over, and before she knows it, the largest shards are in her hands, now in the garbage. And now she's washing her feet off in the sink.

Fifteen minutes later, she's showered and dressed; her makeup is tasteful and immaculate. The kitchen has been cleaned; the floor is bare. There's a badge on her hip and a gun at her side. And Senior Agent Teresa Lisbon gets into her car and goes to work.


End file.
